fore1gn' Post

Last week I built myself a new PC and I put a lot of thought into it. I wanted to make it easily upgradeable with the main bulk of the system lasting me a good 4-5 years. In this blog post, I will show what I chose and then explain my reasoning.

Last year was an amazing one for AMD, with the company releasing a slew of extremely successful new CPUs based on the Zen architecture. This year is getting off to a decent start as well—with a new line of Ryzen CPUs with integrated Vega graphics processors (the R3 2200G and R5 2400G) being launched earlier this week. In this article, we will look at how well these freshly released processors fare against Intel’s integrated graphics, Nvidia’s low-budget GT 1030, and AMD’s own earlier APU integrated graphics.

The PC hardware world is exploding this week over news that the last 10 years of Intel CPUs all contain a massive security flaw, forcing a redesign of the kernel software in Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. This issue is more serious than most security flaws, because it is connected with how the hardware talks with the OS, which means that patching it may impact performance.

Reports have been stating that Intel CPUs may suffer a 5-30% drop in performance after the major OS manufacturers issue their patches. A drop of 5-30% certainly sounds both large and scary. But is it really going to be that bad in real-world situations, or is this alarmist sensationalism? Let’s find out.

These processors are often comparable in terms of price and performance, but building a complete PC is a different story. In this article I will show the differences between two comparable Intel and AMD Ryzen systems, based on the i7-8700K and Ryzen 7 1700 respectively.

Christmas is just around the corner, and incredible sales are undoubtedly coming. If you haven’t been following the PC building scene for the past year or two, then some things may seem daunting at first. For instance: What’s up with crazy high RAM prices? And why are some CPUs and graphics cards out of stock?

If you’re planning to build a new PC this Christmas, then there are some important things to know about. Consider this your Christmas 2017 PC hardware shopping guide.

The GTX 1070 Ti is here. As a graphics card that falls somewhere in-between the GTX 1070 and 1080 in terms of both performance and price, it’s a little curious of a release from NVIDIA… Until you consider the competition.

Back in August, AMD finally released their long-awaited RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 graphics cards, meant to compete with NVIDIA’s high-end Pascal GPUs. The general conclusion was that it was too little too late, with poor availability at launch to further spoil the few positives with the cards. Vega 56 was the more interesting out of the two, offering better performance for a slightly higher price compared to the GTX 1070.

The GTX 1070 Ti is NVIDIA’s answer to RX Vega 56, but it also raises a number of questions related to the $400-$500 graphics card price range.

So, how does the 1070 Ti fair against the competition? Let’s investigate.

Intel’s new Coffee Lake processors have been very competitive with AMD’s Ryzen, as we previously pointed out in our i7-8700K and i5-8600K comparisons against the competition.

Finally, we turn our attention to the 4-core 4-thread i3 line. In this article, I’ll be comparing what we know about the i3-8350K against AMD’s price equivalent, the Ryzen 5 1500X. Intel’s segmentation has gone quite out of hand though, and the 6-core 6-thread i5-8400 falls into the same price category, costing only around $10 more than the 8350K and 1500X.

So, how do these sub-$200 processors compare in gaming and some light productivity work?

With this month’s Coffee Lake release, Intel finally decided to increase the amount of CPU cores they offer to mainstream consumers. The company’s newest Core i5 CPU, the i5-8600K has been upgraded to 6 cores from last generation’s 4-core i5-7600K. In theory, that should mean significantly better multithreaded performance in addition to Intel’s typical single-threaded dominance. But how does the 8600K compare to the previous generation, as well as the price-equivalent chips from AMD?

Intel’s Coffee Lake CPUs are part of the 8th generation of processors.

Last week, Intel released their Coffee Lake-based 8th generation CPUs. Intel has been usually refreshing their processors at the beginning of each year, but this one happened a few months early. (Earlier in July, Intel’s X299-based Skylake-X CPUs also experienced a rushed launch.)

It seems that AMD’s Ryzen CPUs really did light a fire under Intel, with the underdog AMD slowly earning the hearts of both reviewers and customers around the globe. But how does Intel’s newest Coffee Lake mainstream flagship CPU, the i7-8700K, compare to AMD’s Ryzen 7 processors, as well as the previous generation’s i7-7700K?

“Bottleneck” is a term used to describe one component of a system that holds back the rest of the system from reaching its full potential.

Often when trying to diagnose an issue with a PC’s performance, we will eventually reach the topic of bottlenecking. This is especially common when it comes to maximizing performance in a PC game, where either the CPU or the graphics card may “bottleneck” the system, holding it back from achieving its potential in terms of framerate.

So, what exactly are these bottlenecks? And how do you determine if your PC is suffering from a bottlenecking component?